AppleScript and Yosemite

Ray Robertson:

Apple introduced a great variety of new automation features and updates in Yosemite. I’ve written up a quick summary below with links to more detailed information.

Daniel Jalkut:

Unfortunately the progress feature of AppleScript has not been exposed to 3rd party developers, so far as I can tell.

AppleScript Release Notes:

AppleScript/Objective-C is now available to all scripts, not just library scripts.

I’ve been wanting this feature for years. You no longer have to create a special AppleScriptObjC application; you can use it from any script. This will be useful both for the powerful Cocoa APIs as well as the many basic data structures and operations that were never part of AppleScript.

Here are some examples:

use framework "Foundation"

-- Calling an Objective-C class method:
get current application's NSDate's timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate()

-- Use pipes to avoid conflicts with AppleScript keywords.
get current application's NSDate's |date|'s timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate()

-- Basically, you just use “'s” in place of “.”.
set _array to current application's NSMutableArray's alloc()'s init()

-- “count” is also reserved.
get _array's |count|()

-- AppleScript changes “_array's addObject_(1)” to the interleaved syntax:
_array's addObject:1

-- AppleScript changes “_array's insertObject_atIndex_(0, 0)” to:
_array's insertObject:0 atIndex:0

set _string to _array's |description|()
set _appleScriptString to _string as Unicode text

set _data to _string's dataUsingEncoding:(current application's NSUTF8StringEncoding)
set _tildePath to current application's NSString's stringWithString:"~/Desktop/test"
set _path to _tildePath's stringByExpandingTildeInPath()
set {_ok, _error} to _data's writeToFile:_path options:0 |error|:(reference)
-- Should return “{1, missing value}”.
-- The file will contain “(0, 1)”.

Unfortunately, it looks like the technology is not yet very mature. Script Editor beach balled and had to be force-quit half a dozen times while I was writing this sample.

Update (2014-10-31): Joris Kluivers shows that developers can get at the progress of a script—via NSProgress.

Update (2014-11-29): Mark Aldritt:

What is not explained is how a host application can access this information and display a script’s progress in its own UI. Here’s how you do it.

At intervals the script will call the OSAActiveProc. Within this callback function you can make OSA calls that access the running script’s state. You start by getting a reference to the ‘AppleScript’ object. From there you can read the value of the four progress properties.

AppleScript AppleScriptObjC Bug Cocoa Mac Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite NSProgress Programming

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use framework "Foundation"
use scripting additions

script ASOCTest
   property parent : class "NSObject"
   --
   on test()
      activate
      display dialog "Hello from AppleScript!"
   end test
end script

from Foundation import NSBundle, NSClassFromString
import AppleScriptObjC

NSBundle.alloc().initWithPath_(FOLDERPATH).loadAppleScriptObjectiveCScripts()

ASOCTest = NSClassFromString(u"ASOCTest") # get the ASOC class...
ASOCTest.alloc().init().test() # ...then instantiate and call it

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